Shannon Laws is an award-winning poet, performer, and advocate for the arts. She has been recognized with two Mayor’s Arts Awards and the Dr. Asha Bhargava Memorial Award — Community Champion. Her work has been featured in numerous journals and anthologies, and she has captivated audiences at esteemed literary events, including the Jack McCarthy Evergreen Invitational Slam, SpeakEasy, Poetry Night, Kitchen Sessions, and the West Coast Tagore Festival.
Beyond her writing and performances, Shannon actively fosters literary
and artistic communities. Since 2022, she has curated Corridor, a monthly
“found-art” zine project that showcases the work of more than 50 contributing
poets and artists. She is also the founder and host of Poetry Club, an engaging
discussion group established in 2015.
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One thought on “Poem: Deaths Dip”
This is a real situation that happened my first week in Bellingham. Went to a woman’s shelter (Love, Inc.) and received a free mattress wrapped in plastic. As hard as I tried I couldn’t stay OUT of the dip. To make the free verse poem more powerful I wrote it in present tense.
However, the mattress stayed with the house when I moved out about a year and half later. It freaked me out too much! I didn’t want to die, but to live, yet, I understood the dip. If that makes any sense.
shannon p. laws 
This is a real situation that happened my first week in Bellingham. Went to a woman’s shelter (Love, Inc.) and received a free mattress wrapped in plastic. As hard as I tried I couldn’t stay OUT of the dip. To make the free verse poem more powerful I wrote it in present tense.
However, the mattress stayed with the house when I moved out about a year and half later. It freaked me out too much! I didn’t want to die, but to live, yet, I understood the dip. If that makes any sense.
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